This is…

A calling
A reckoning
An inheritance

How do we hold history as both a wound and a gift? What do we owe the buried? Who decides what is uncovered and what must remain hidden?

The Black Third sits with these questions, and with those who answer them: Frantz Fanon, Pauli Murray, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Fannie Lou Hamer, Eunice Johnson, Bryan Stevenson.

This is literary journalism grounded in theological inquiry. We sit with elders before their memories disappear. Ask children what they see that we’ve been trained to overlook. Trace the structures that shape our lives.

Khalilah L. Liptrot holds advanced degrees in journalism and theology and spent two decades in newsrooms at CNN, Al Jazeera America , Al Jazeera English and CBS News. She brings a journalist’s discipline and the audacity to ask what it all means.

She trusts readers as the Black press always has: with the full story, in sorrow and joy; with beauty and urgency as partners, not opposites; with the understanding that bearing witness is not passive, but an act of love.

Each week: conversations that outlast the news cycle, portraits of communities carving freedom in the margins, investigations into how power sanctifies itself and how resistance endures.

And weekly portraits: the people, the choices, the work.

The Black Third uncovers what refuses to stay buried.